A change in a manner of generating, populating, obtaining, and using information and content is a most significant change which the Internet brings to people's life. Various Internet-based applications come out one after another, most of which are related to the “content”. According to a statistics report of China Internet Network Information Center, online music, online news, search engine, instant messaging, online video, blog application, and social network are the most significant types of network applications at present. In fact, all these applications may be regarded as content sharing. As a result, content sharing becomes a more and more important function of the Internet. Although the “content” was not placed in a key position when the Internet came out, the “content” actually is playing a key role in the Internet. A main task of a conventional network is to transfer content from one place to another; however, information in a network is more likely used for sharing and cooperation at present. Therefore, a novel network architecture, that is, a content-centric network (Content Centric Network, CCN) is proposed. This network can run in parallel with the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol, Transmission Control Protocol)/IP (Internet Protocol, Internet Protocol) or run independently without affecting existing networks.
A content-centric network, for example, an NDN (Named Data Networking) network, primarily includes two types of packets, an interest packet (Interest Packet) and a data packet (Data Packet). An interest packet may be used to subscribe to a data packet. At present, one interest packet can be used to subscribe to only one data packet. As a result, when there are a large number of subscription requirements, a large number of interest packets need to be sent in a network, causing large network signaling overhead.